Gathering Momentum: Von Braun’s Work in the 1940s and 1950s by Ernst Stuhlinger

Wemher von Bmun at his desk in Peenemünde, winter 1943. Ordway Collection!Space Rocket Center. Rocket Development at Peenemünde    At the German army’s rocket center at Peenemünde, which had opened in 1937 with Wernher von Braun as technical director, rocket development and facility buildup proceeded quite smoothly until 1942. An island both geographically and in the security sense, the center’s isolation permitted top secret work to be...

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Red Stars and Rocket Ships: Space Flight and the Cosmos in Early Soviet Culture by Scott W. Palmer

    With the launch of Sputnik, the first unmanned space mission, in 1957, and Vostok, the first manned vehicle to reach outer space, in 1961, Russia's pioneering postwar space program gained international recognition. The subsequent voyages of the Soyuz and Salyut spacecraft in the 1970s solidified Russia's leading role in space exploration. More recently, the space station Mir has dominated international news with reports, first, of its...

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Dreams of Space Travel from Antiquity to Verne by Frederick I. Ordway III

        Gustave Dove’s depiction of Lukian’s True History, in which a sailing ship carrying Greek athletes is lifted by a “most violent whirlwind” to the Moon. Ordway Collection Space & Rocket Center.   We don’t know when the idea of flying into space first occurred to a human being. In the remote past a story-teller may have woven a tale of gods, or god­like men, soaring into the heavens. That they could...

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